1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a printing system having a function for reporting the current position (line, column) in the print buffer of a printing device to a host computer, to a printing device used in this printing system, and to a print control method.
2. Related Art
When receiving (or reading) and writing print data to a print buffer for printing continuously, printing devices (printers) according to the related art automatically insert a new line in data exceeding the preset printing width (column count) of the print medium.
Printers that read and display data from a storage unit, sequentially read the data when printing, and move words exceeding the right margin to the next line are known from the literature. See, for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Appl. Pub. JP-A-S61-95438.
When receiving and printing continuous print data from a host computer, such printers automatically insert a new line at the data exceeding the preset printing width (column count) of the print medium.
This is shown in FIG. 3.
FIG. 3 shows an example in which the printer is set to print 42 columns across the width of the print medium, and print data of 70 continuous characters is sent from the host computer.
In this example the printer automatically inserts a new line after the 42nd character (column 42) in the 70-character long print data, and the current printing position after finishing printing on the new line is line 2, column 28.
However, the current printing position (line 2, column 28) of the printer after the automatic new line is not reported to the host computer.
If the next print data is print data that continues from the previous print data when the host computer then sends the next print data, no particular problem occurs when the next print data is sent.
What happens when the next print data is graphic data, however, is described next using FIG. 4. If the printer receives graphic data from the host computer after inserting a new line at the 42nd character (column 42) of print data that continues for 70 characters as shown in FIG. 3, the data written to the print buffer of the printer (and the printed result) will be as shown in FIG. 4.
When this happens, graphic data that should be written from the beginning is recorded from some point in the middle of the line, and is therefore broken in two parts. The layout of the printout is thus detrimentally affected.